The Children's Block

by Otto Kraus

  Fredy had been too dazed to eat. He had managed to swallow only two spoonfuls of the mush.

  ‘You eat the rest,’ he’d said to the child and he had turned to the wooden wall. But the boy wouldn’t eat and the pot remained by the bed, slowly setting into a sweet solid cake.

  The Slovakian Registrar had returned early in the afternoon. It was the 7th of March and he’d known that the SS would call a curfew at dusk, as soon as the sun had begun to set.

  ‘Wake up.’ He had shaken Fredy by his shoulder. ‘I’ve spoken to the underground people. There is no train and the Special Commando is preparing the gas chambers. The only way is to fight. Blow the whistle before it gets dark.’

  He had bent over the sleeper but the man had been in a deep swoon. His mouth was open and his breath shallow and laborious. For a moment the Registrar had been tempted to take the whistle himself, but he had drawn back because it wasn’t his turn to die. He had sent the errand boy for a doctor who had taken Fredy’s pulse and lifted his eyelid with his finger.

  ‘What’s the use? Why not let him sleep?’

  He had been about to leave the Quarantine Camp any minute now and he was impatient with the Registrar; the Germans might call a curfew in a moment and he didn’t want to be caught in the hubbub.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Some kind of poison perhaps. Who knows? In normal circumstances I might try to save him, but what sense does it make here?’ He had shrugged and he’d turned to go.

  ‘He had a task to do.’

  The physician had looked down at the strained face.

  ‘They’ll take him on a stretcher.’ He had paused and then went on. ‘I have been trained to save the living.’

  Somebody outside had called out the doctor’s number and he and the Registrar had left in a hurry. The child had squatted on the floor for a long time and then eaten the cold mush.

  2.

  THE CHILDREN WERE SMALL FOR their age. They were white and undernourished because they had been in the camps for a long time – some of them, like Adam Landau, Bubenik or Majda, for as long as three years. Half of Alex Ehren’s wards went to Heydebreck, or wherever the transport had been sent, so only twelve children remained. They had so many wooden stools now that each child had one for itself and could use another one as a table to write on, to draw a picture or eat his soup from his bowl. In the past, when the block was still crowded, some of the children had to sit on the earthen floor, where they squatted like frogs in the dim light that fell through the window slits. They had no pockets because the lining of their clothes had been ripped out and the holes sewn fast. They tied their food bowls to their waist and threaded the spoon through a buttonhole. The rest of their possessions – a crust of bread, a broken comb or a glass shard – they wrapped in a rag and hid in their shirts. At the beginning, the children laughed at each other’s looks because the boys wore men’s hats whose brims had been cut like shovels, and the girls trailed their coats, which were far too long for their legs. They looked as if they were standing in front of a crooked mirror, for each of them was a joke, a caricature of their previous self. However, as they were all equally grotesque, they grew accustomed to their appearance and laughed no more.

  Sometimes they traded a piece of clothing among themselves, swapped a jacket, a shirt or even a foot rag for their clogs. Yet the boys took care not to lose their shovel hats because at dawn and in the evening Himmelblau taught them to take off their hats and put them on again. He stood in front of the row and repeated the drill, again and again, until they were like one body and their hands rose and fell in one sharp sweep. Yet even then he kept them drilling because whenever an SS Block Senior appeared at the entrance all the boys, from the first graders to those who were almost fourteen, tore off their hats and stood at attention.

  There were two roll calls, one at dawn and another at dusk, but the evening call was the worst because the inmates were exhausted from a day of labour, and some of the sick or elderly toppled over and died. There was a piece of rail on a chain, which the Camp Capo beat with an iron pipe, and the prisoners, driven by the wardens, scuttled and formed a five-row formation. On the days of the fiercest cold, the children took their roll call inside the block, where they were sheltered from the rain and wind. Sometimes a child failed to obey the bell because he had fallen asleep or was playing in a corner.

  Himmelblau was responsible for the correct number of children and he suffered from stomach cramps before every roll call. He kept counting the children even during the day but each time the number changed and he had either two too many or one not enough, and he started counting again. He woke up at night in a cold sweat and next morning sold his bread ration to Julius Abeles for a pinch of tobacco. He rolled a cigarette vowing that it would be his last and that starting from tomorrow he would abstain from his vice. Yet at the same time he knew that his craving for tobacco was stronger than his will and that without a cigarette he couldn’t go through another roll call.

  Alex Ehren’s children were barely eight, but they were unruly and wild and he had difficulty keeping them together. He took them for a walk but they scattered like water drops, peeped into barracks, fought and shouted until the hunchbacked Camp Capo limped from his room and waved his cane.

  ‘Whoah,’ he said in his croaking voice. ‘What’s going on? Can’t you make the brats behave? Should I use the cane and thrash one or two?’ Yet he laughed at their pranks because he had a weak spot for Adam Landau, one of the boys.

  To hold their attention Alex Ehren invented a memory game. They were explorers and traveled in the jungles of the Amazon, to the North Pole or in the forests of Africa.

  ‘When we come back we’ll draw a map,’ he said. ‘Remember, never before has man visited these parts so be careful to remember.’

  He split his explorers into three parties and those who came up with the most details won the competition. They loved the game and Alex Ehren soon had a map with good measurements of the camp.

  ‘Save it,’ said Felsen the communist as he looked at the paper. ‘One day it may come in handy.’

  ‘Handy for what?’

  But Felsen drew his head deep into his coat and wouldn’t answer. He often left the Children’s Block and Himmelblau had to ask Lisa Pomnenka, the handicraft instructor, to fill in for the history teacher.

  * * *

  The BIIb Czech Camp, like other Birkenau compounds, was 600 metres long and 130 metres wide. There were thirty-two wooden stables along the camp road, the even numbers on the right and the odd on the left. One of the blocks was used as a kitchen, another as the Registrar’s office, another one as the clothes storeroom and at the far end of the camp was the hospital and the Children’s Block. There were three latrines, each with 396 holes, and two washrooms with four corrugated iron troughs. The two rows of barracks were separated by the road and two parallel ditches, which drained the muddy grounds. Around the compound ran the electrically charged fence, dotted with projectors on concrete pillars that bent forward like the tentacles of an octopus.

  Each barracks was 40 metres long, 9 metres wide and 2.5 metres high, which added up to 1,000 metres. With an average occupation of 500 prisoners, each inmate was allotted 2 cubic metres of living space. A horizontal chimney stack cut through the length of the barracks. At the front end there was a space where soup was distributed at noon. There was a similar space at the rear, where during the night latrine containers were placed and corpses stacked before they were taken away by the Cart Commando next morning. To the left and to the right of the entrance were two whitewashed cubicles, one for the Block Senior and the other for the Deputy Block Senior and the Block Registrar.

  The children added and subtracted the figures and Neugeboren, who was the sharpest of the group, came up with the result.

  ‘Less than a metre of floor space for each person,’ said the boy but he wasn’t surprised or taken aback, because he had forgotten the world outside. He had an intimation, like a shadow moving in the dar
k, of a window with flowing curtains, of a bed with a bright cover and the fragrance of a flower. Yet all that was deep in the past and the boy didn’t know whether it was a memory or a tale told by the instructor.

  Adam Landau was the worst of the boys and Alex Ehren would have beaten him had he dared to break the rules.

  ‘You beat once and it helps,’ Himmelblau had told him, ‘but when you beat again it doesn’t help so much and you beat more and longer. Where is the end of beating? Think where the children live and what they see. On the camp road, behind the fence, in the barracks. Horrible things. They see cruelty and pain. And death. These have become commonplace. Will Adam be better if I give him a slap on his bottom? Or pull his ear? Or will he become worse?’ He spoke fast and had to pause for breath.

  ‘In the camp our rules look foolish. But what harm can a little foolishness do in a world of insanity? Maybe in a world of insanity our foolishness is reason. We do not beat them and we do not make the children fear. We do not speak about the future; we live only for the here and now. We make an island in the sea. We pretend that we are not in the camp. We make them forget the chimney, their hunger and the Germans. We create a world of make-believe.’

  It was an inspired speech and Himmelblau had meant every word of it. But when he returned to his cubicle he rolled himself a cigarette, the third this morning, and felt afraid of things to come.

  It was all right in theory, thought Alex Ehren, but Himmelblau didn’t have to deal with the brat day after day, didn’t have to make him sit or write and prevent him from kicking Bubenik on the shin. He was lucky, he decided, that Adam often played hooky for days at a stretch.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked the child.

  ‘None of your business. Had more important things to do.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Don’t remember.’ The boy was as hard as a pebble.

  There were others who disturbed the lesson but none was as malicious as Adam. He was tiny, almost a dwarf, with the face of an angel but with a temper of a wildcat. The smaller boys lived with their mothers but the older ones slept in the Men’s Block. However, there were children like Adam Landau, who had come to the camp without their parents and had to fend for themselves in the murky world of the barracks.

  Alex Ehren woke the children an hour before the roll call and they marched through the shivering dawn to the washroom. It was so cold that the puddles turned brittle with ice, which the children broke with their wooden clogs. They stripped to their waists and washed in a trickle of water, so thick and ill-smelling that the SS were forbidden to rinse their plates in it. It was cold at night and the taps were furry with frost. The children flapped their arms and blew on their fists as they waited their turn for the one towel they shared. Alex kept a list of who would use the towel first and who came later, when the cloth was soaked and limp with water.

  ‘I won’t wash. Not today,’ Adam hid his hands in his ancient overcoat. ‘Washed yesterday and that’s enough.’

  ‘No exceptions.’ Alex Ehren held out a piece of rough soap.

  ‘We’ll go up the chimney clean or dirty.’ Adam spat on the ground in imitation of Jagger, the Camp Capo, who was his friend. ‘I don’t give a fart about your rules.’ He looked up with his eyebrows knitted and his mouth puckered in a sulk.

  Sometimes the hunchbacked Capo came to the Children’s Block and went off with Adam.

  ‘Let’s go and check what’s cooking,’ he would say and they would walk to the Kitchen Block where he ordered Otto, the Kitchen Capo, to let Adam suck on a marrow bone.

  On such days the boy missed his portion of soup, which Alex dealt out to the other children. Adam didn’t mind foregoing his ration because the Capo would give him an apple, another time a piece of cheese and sometimes a sugar cube from a dead man’s pocket.

  The children were not supposed to mention the chimney or use foul language. Their life was full of regulations – there was a way to get up, to dress and to wash in the morning, and another rule about visiting their parents. There were things that were done and others that weren’t, and as long as they followed the rules, they were sheltered in the womb of the Children’s Block. True, the regulations restricted their freedom and some rebelled and tried to break out. Yet once they pierced the balloon of make-believe they were exposed to the horrors of the day.

  ‘For the last time,’ said Alex Ehren, locked in a battle of wills, ‘take off your jacket and wash.’

  Adam looked at his mates, at Neugeboren who had pushed Fredy’s pudding under the fence, at Bubenik, his rival, and at the thin girls in their coats, with their kerchiefs over their hair.

  ‘Damn you,’ he said and tore at his jacket.

  He ducked and cursed but he did strip and take off his six shirts, which he wore onion fashion, one over the other. He stretched his arm and drew back at the touch of cold water. He rubbed his eyes, his ears and his neck with his hand and started to dress.

  ‘You have to use soap,’ said Alex Ehren.

  The others watched in a circle with their eyes alive and excited. They weren’t Bubenik and Neugeboren and Eva and Hanka any more, but a bunch of savages eager to kill.

  Once, when Adam had dodged his wash three times in a row, Alex Ehren had let the children grab his arms and legs and strip him. ‘One,’ they’d chanted and took off his first shirt. ‘Two and three,’ they’d triumphed over the next layer. ‘Four!’ Majda, who was a timid girl with ash-blonde braids tied with a piece of string, had exclaimed. Adam had scratched and twisted like a weasel and pelted them with foul language. He’d cursed Alex Ehren, his mates, Himmelblau and the Block.

  ‘The Capo,’ he’d said, ‘he’ll beat the shit out of you.’

  They’d rolled him, small and naked, into the slimy trough and scrubbed his back with a twig broom and a piece of jute, which they had torn from a straw mattress. It had been fun and when they’d finished they were as wet as the boy, but they hadn’t seemed to mind. It had been good to vent their fear on their mate and comrade.

  For some time afterwards Alex Ehren was afraid to meet Jagger, the Camp Capo, but the hunchback didn’t bear Alex Ehren a grudge.

  ‘I am taking the child for an outing,’ Jagger had said in his deep voice. ‘He is too small to read and write and work on sums. Plenty of time to catch up later,’ and he’d winked, laughing at his morbid joke.

  Alex Ehren hated the regulation soap and had it not been for the children, he wouldn’t have used it on his hands, his chest and his face. In the evening when the children left the Block to see their parents, the instructors sat on the horizontal chimney and ate their bread rations. They ate their slice slowly, holding it in their cupped palms, anxious not to let even one morsel fall on the ground. It was all the bread they got for a day and some preferred to save a part of it, the crumb or the crust, for breakfast. The bread was dark and heavy and came in small square loaves of which each prisoner received one quarter. Sometimes they got with it five grams of margarine or a piece of cheese or dollop of beetroot jam, and on Sundays a slice of substitute sausage.

  They chewed each mouthful at least seven times to savour its flavour and the life-giving strength. They swallowed the bread with remorse because once the food had left the tongue and palate, it was irreversibly gone. One evening Fabian stood up and held up a piece of soap.

  ‘In our world nothing gets lost. Where does the bread go? It goes down into my stomach and from there to my hands and head and body and makes me live. But what happens when I die?’ He tried to catch their eyes. ‘I did some research,’ he said, ‘and found the answer.

  ‘This, my learned friends, is a cake of soap, which helps us to stay alive. Isn’t it written—’ he motioned to the slogan painted on the rafters ‘—one louse, thy death. Imagine, a small, almost microscopic creature and so deadly. How about man who is a thousand times bigger than a louse? Let alone an SS officer who looms even higher?’ He paused, allowing the instructors time to laugh.

  He turned the so
ap in his fingers and brought it close to his broken glasses.

  ‘Look, there is something written on the soap. There are three letters: R J F. I wonder what these letters stand for.’

  ‘Probably the name of the factory,’ said Himmelblau.

  ‘Not so.’ Fabian grimaced and held the soap away from his face. ‘The Germans burn the dead and use their ashes as fertiliser. One day a Jew and next day a cabbage. Though I would prefer a cherry tree or a rosebush. Anything but a concentration camp. But what do they do with the little fat that remains?’

  ‘Enough,’ said Marta Felix, frowning. ‘The joke has gone far enough.’

  ‘What joke? R J F. Real Jewish Fat… that’s what the letters mean. This is what I have been told by a man from Monowitz.’

  It was Fabian’s fear that made him speak of their death. He flouted his death, hoisted it like a banner and came back to it like a thief to the scene of his crime. He cracked jokes about his own death to assuage his terror. At the beginning, every time Alex Ehren thought of his death, his heart missed a beat. It happened once or twice, but then his rage welled up from his stomach and rose to his head and his anger became stronger than his terror.

  ‘I will not,’ he said, ‘I will not go meekly to the slaughter. I will not be burned to fertilise German fields and I will not be made into a cake of soap. I may die, but I will take some of them with me.’

  He sat on the tepid chimney with his eyes to the ground, but with his fists clenched so tight that his palms hurt.

  The instructors were silent but after a while they took up another theme. At the beginning they were timid but then their voices grew louder, as if they were trying to drown out the words that would have been better left unsaid.